On Where My Catholic Identity Goes From Here, My Connection to Armenians, and More

 This is a bit of a follow-up to my last post as there are a few things I want to sort out before moving forward.  I am in the process of drafting a letter of direction to my former parish priest, Fr. Grassi, because I value his input as a true man of God.  There is a lot here to sort out, so I will just dive into it. 

To begin, let me talk a bit about my Catholic faith.  I say up-front that I am Catholic until the day I die, but it comes with some boundaries now too.  What I am about to say about myself is not going to go over well with either mainstream and more liberal Catholics, or with the trads either, because I have some things I differ on with both of those extremes.  I guess the biggest thing is to define who I am as a Catholic, and then try to plot a course forward (the spoiler - as I am writing this, I already have a plan, so we're good, but you just need to hear it).  As I mentioned some time back, I am a Vicentian Catholic in the truest sense in that I am pretty much inclusive of all Christian tradition that is rooted in Apostolic faith - this means that when I say "Catholic," I mean anyone who holds the historic and traditional Catholic faith over the ages, and it is not consigned to just churches who see the Vatican as their leadership - in recent decades I would argue that there are good Catholics who are still faithful to the true faith despite some of the stupidity that comes from the Vatican and from many robed bureaucrats with the titles of "Bishop" or "Cardinal."  Many people I would mention as rightly being called Catholic are not in communion with Rome - the Orthodox, the Oriental Churches (including the Assyrians), the more conservative Old Catholic jurisdictions, the SSPX and the sedevacantists, the Polish National Catholics, traditional Anglicans, and even a few Evangelicals in the East in particular who have still maintained the traditions of their people (groups like the Armenian Evangelicals; the Mar Thoma, St. Thomas Evangelical, and Believers Eastern Churches in India; Coptic Evangelicals in Egypt; some Assyrian Evangelicals, and groups such as the Eastern-Rite Lutherans, the Georgian Baptists, and others).  Those Evangelical groups don't have the fullness of Apostolicity, but they do participate in it on a certain level.  There are other groups within the Roman fold though I believe that fully embody Catholic faith - parishes such as my old home parish in Charles Town, WV for instance, as well as the Eastern-rite Churches, which thankfully for the most part have been largely immune to the BS the Vatican and some liberal Roman Catholics push.   Likewise, I would like to distinguish who I also call Christian, because I believe a large number of Evangelicals are also my brothers and sisters in Christ, and to that degree they participate to a limited degree as well in the true Catholic faith although neither they nor some Catholics would admit that.  Because I have highlighted groups who are fairly conservative and traditional and I have an ecumenical sentiment with them, I would be chastised by those James Martin and Cardinal Cupich types.  Also, because I believe Protestants - in particular good Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants - to be fellow Christians, then some self-professed Trads would not be happy with me either.  However, in all honesty, I have grown too old to care about what they think, because I know from whence I speak too.  I was a former Evangelical Protestant, and as such I knew I was a Christian and served Christ, but I also knew a dimension to my sincere faith was lacking and discovered it when I decided to embrace the true Catholic faith.   However, despite the Trads and other converts who have a narrower view about who or what should be called "Christian," I also did not come to faith like some of them did either.  I have told the story of my Convergence Movement participation in the mid-1990s, but there is another dimension to my actual faith I need to share to clear up where I stand too.  For my TLM friends, this is going to make their heads explode, but equally it will rattle the feathers of some former Fundies I knew too in the Protestant traditions.   Again, I don't care, because what I am about to share is what really shaped my spirituality and faith, and I am more Catholic today because of it. 

For most of my Christian life, and practically all my Catholic journey, I didn't get a lot of influence from Roman Catholic writers.  There are many I have read, and I also did have some good professors at Steubenville that enriched me deeply, but they more or less provided the undergirding to convictions I already had shaped over many years.  Even back in my Protestant days, I had a deep and endearing connection to the Christian East - it started when I was in high school with learning about the Byzantine Empire, and it grew later as I became acquainted with a number of very amazing Middle Eastern Christian communities such as the Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Copts, and others.  While I am not 100% Eastern Christian myself, my influences lean that direction and have for decades now.  In my Catholic part of my Christian walk, the parishes I went to where I was primarily the happiest were Byzantine and Maronite congregations, and one of my earliest spiritual mentors was the late Fr. Eusebius Stephanou, who was an early Orthodox participant in Charismatic Renewal and he is the primary individual who introduced me to the richness of Patristic writings.  I also owe much to other Eastern Christians, including Fr. Qasha Klutz of the Assyrian Church, with whom I had a very long friendship until his passing last year.  Then there is also the late Dr. Krikor Haleblian, who although an Armenian Pentecostal pastor and professor at Fuller Seminary, was a mentor to me as well about Armenian liturgical and spiritual practices.  Dr. Haleblian's book, The Armenian Church in Context, was something I received from him personally as an autographed gift, and I still use it to this day.  People like Fr. Klutz, Fr. Eusebius, and Dr. Haleblian helped me to understand what it meant to be an Eastern Christian, and also how to integrate some of those Eastern Christian elements into my own faith, which I have done.  I don't rule out the West either though, as I mentioned many great professors at Steubenville (I give particular mention here to Dr. Bergsma, Dr. Crosby, Dr. Regis Martin, Dr. Scott Hahn, and Dr. Mark Miravalle), as well as one of the best Anglican bishops I have ever met, my former diocesan Archbishop Mark Haverland of the Anglican Catholic Church.  And of course, I cannot leave out Fr. Timothy Grassi, my very wonderful former parish priest who really went above and beyond with helping me.  Along the way as well, there were even a few decent Evangelicals that merit consideration, as they are the ones who taught my about intercultural relations (thanks Baba Rodney White), common-sense living out one's faith ( I owe that one to the late Rev. Olen Phillips, who also I was blessed to be led to Christ by and was baptized, and also Rev. Clarence S. Pansler, who had a realistic way of living out a true Christian life).  These are all people that have personally impacted the person I became as a Catholic Christian, and they also shaped much of my own faith in ways they never imagined.  Like a good recipe for a stew, each of them contributed an ingredient or two into my own "recipe" of faith, and integrating that helped me in so many ways.  That is why they are my personal "hall of heroes" as they and some others I forgot to mention were catalytic in the development of my personal faith.   However, there has been the opposition too, so let's briefly deal with them.

I have been in the ring so to speak combatting a diverse group of adversaries - over-zealous Trad Catholics, mouthy Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, rabidly leftist Liberation theologians, lukewarm Catholics who have a skewered view of the authority of the Papacy, and a few very staunch Orthodox Christians.  While a handful of these people later became good friends and we respect each other today, in the perpetual battlefield known as social media I have had to block people who just got obnoxious.  One, a Pentecostal fundamentalist in Florida named Karen, once threatened my job for calling her out on some racist nonsense she posted on her personal page.  Another, a young, stupid, and impulsive Trad Catholic, threatened a sort of apocalyptic violence against me - he told me essentially when I called him out on his attitude that he "would meet me on the field of battle during World War III and introduce me to the Final Judge."  And then there are the liberals - they hate people like me.  The conservative Christians - Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox - are mostly decent and the more obnoxious among them are a small minority.  However, in recent weeks two things have happened at once that brought some of what is being called the "Woke Right" out of the woodwork.  The first was talk surrounding Dolly Parton's death, and the second is the rise of a young group of hotheaded dumbasses calling themselves "Orthobros" who are feigning conversion to the Orthodox Church but do not reflect Orthodox Christianity in any way (these are not the same class of converts like Fr. Peter Gillquist, who was part of the Evangelical Orthodox movement in the 1970s and 1980s and eventually was received into full communion - he and his group were decent guys who had a wealth of good material that helped me.  These so-called "Orthobros" are much like some of the Mad-Trads among TLM Catholics, and have a similar mentality).  I am now going to take these one at a time and give my thoughts on them.

First, regarding Dolly Parton's death, I must say for the most part many were positive about her and genuinely liked her.  Liking and respecting someone though and agreeing with everything they might believe are not the same thing, and they should not be conflated.  Dolly, like all of us, was a fallible human being who made mistakes, but she had a quality many people lack - she was real, and that is why she garnered a lot of respect.  This is especially true among people in my native Appalachian region, because Dolly was a daughter of the mountains and we understood who she was and where she came from.  That being said, there have been some idiots posing as "Christians" who decided to take a big ol' figurative dump on poor Dolly's grave before her remains even chilled, and I found that astounding - you don't disrespect the dead, even when you don't like them. It is rude, and in poor taste, especially if they recently passed and haven't even had formal funerary rites yet.  A former professor of mine who is a great guy, Dr. Alan Harrelson  was the one who shed light on these jackasses, and he pointed out two very prominent ones.  The first is a Fundie Baptist named Spencer Smith, who more or less said Dolly was consigned to hell because she didn't have the same cookie-cutter faith he does, and the way he acted was appalling.  This is not the first time Fundie Baptists have done dumb things though - remember Kent Hovind, Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, the Duggars, etc.?  Bottom line is that these are the wrong people to be attacking someone, as they have enough dung in their own potato patch to smell up an Iowa cornfield.  Dr. Harrelson, with his endearing Southern drawl and his direct way of saying things plainly, told Spencer Smith what he could do with his "judgment:"  basically, he told them to shove it up their backsides, and I agree 100%.   The second guy was a big letdown, and that was Ken Ham.  While admittedly Ken Ham has done some good work with Creationism, and I have even used his material at times, I also see him now in the same light as his now-disgraced Fundie Baptist buddy Kent Hovind - he called Dolly basically demon-possessed, and then said she "enriched" herself with Dollywood (ironic, since Ken Ham basically opened his own theme park called the Ark Encounter that rivals in scale to Jim and Tammy Bakker's old Heritage USA scheme - what is with these Fundies and money-making schemes??).  Dr. Harrelson made an excellent point that I have been saying for years, and it is this - he noted that people like Ken Ham idolize their own interpretation of Scripture over actual Scripture, and that their interpretation even overshadows Christ's love for mankind and desire for all humanity to be saved.  I will even take Dr. Harrelson's very astute point further and say that Ken Ham and others like him love to codify their own variation of what I call the "tradition of anti-tradition," and by conflating the Holy Tradition of the Church with Jesus's admonition against "traditions of men," they create their own.  And, as Dr. Harrelson (who also recently converted to the Catholic faith too) also correctly noted, it is a form of idolatry because for all their cries of Sola Scriptura, they don't really have a high view of actual Scripture - instead, they idolize their own opinions about Scripture, which often entails a lot of twisted stuff.  However, I have another serious issue with Ken Ham that goes beyond this discussion.  Many of us who are Catholics are Young-Earth Creationists, and although the Catholic Church itself has no official position on origins (they say study the views essentially to be informed about them in Papal documents) it is also not discouraged officially, although Darwinian-derived theistic evolution tends to taint the more bureaucratic of Popes and Cardinals due to influences such as Teilhard de Chardin.  However, instead of seeing good Catholic Creationists such as John Wynne and Hugh Owen of the Kolbe Center as valuable resources, Ham and his ilk let their anti-Catholicism taint their judgments, and therefore Catholic Creationists often have to operate independently of the more Evangelical-heavy Creationist networks, despite having the same convictions.  This has been influential in steering me away from relying on Ken Ham's materials - I still utilize some good Protestant Creationists' works, such as those of Henry Morris, but when they invite scandal like Kent Hovind or act like pompous self-righteous jackasses like Ken Ham, they don't merit my support at that point.  Thanks to my good friend Hugh Owen, a lot of my own studies on origins go back to the Patristic writings and other documents to shape my own perspective, and Hugh has been a huge blessing over the years with supplying materials to me.  If you want a good Catholic Creationist study as a matter of fact, I would highly recommend Foundations Restored, because it is a rich reservoir of sound Catholic teaching on origins, and Hugh played a big part in its production.  If you are interested, check out the website at www.foundationsrestored.com.  The Kolbe Center as well has a lot of good resources as well too, and you can check them out at www.kolbecenter.org.  That way, you can steer away from the anti-Catholic BS of people like Ken Ham, and you can receive sound teaching on origins from good Catholic sources.  As a proponent of Intelligent Design as well, I recommend the premiere group for that called the Discovery Institute, and you can access them at www.discovery.org.  DI also has some good online courses available as well, and a lot of Catholics work with them as they have a much more ecumenical scope.  Any rate, I got off-track there a bit about that, so let's regain our bearings and move on.  However, in concluding this particular part of the discussion, I think some people would be better if they just shut up, particularly when disrespecting the dead like Dolly Parton - my goodness, let her at least be buried first before you start attacking her, fools!  I think that sums up my sentiments on that, so there is more to talk about. 

So, I went down that rabbit trail to come back to the discussion, and the subtexts here were relevant to the discussion as I am in a place in life where I am not going to necessarily hold everything like your typical Roman Catholic does - while the theology is not a question, some social and ecclesiological things are, and those are what I oppose.  As a young man in Bible college years ago, I fell in love with Armenians and Assyrians, and always felt a vocation to work with them in some way - that is one reason my major and concentration were Missions when I was an undergrad.  However, the unfortunate thing about Evangelical Bible college Missions programs in the 1990s when I was an undergrad was that students were indoctrinated to "convert" people in distant lands to a cookie-cutter version of themselves, and that never sat well with me.  A lot of that was fueled by another man-made tradition of Evangelicals - anti-Catholicism.  However, it was not confined to just Roman Catholics, oh no - a good "on-fire" Pentecostal missionary had to go after the Orthodox, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, and - I kid you not on this! - even the Amish and Mennonites, whom many of them considered their so-called spiritual forebears!  In other words, basically these American Protestants saw themselves as the true manifestation of Biblical Christianity, and they were taught that anyone else (especially ancient Churches who predated them by centuries) was seen as "heathen" and "unsaved."  I was the odd man out then too, because I always thought it was stupid to convert other Christians - I mean, it is one thing if you want to evangelize pagan tribes or Muslims, but other Christians??  In cultivating close and warm relationships with a lot of Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Copts, Ethiopians, Syriac Indians, and others over the years, as well as a lot of ethnic Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities, I saw Christ in many of these people, and they probably had their spiritual affairs more together than the idiot young Bible college "missionaries" did.   So, the rhetoric at a Pentecostal university then frankly offended me because I knew better in all honesty, and when I had a forum to do so, I openly challenged that mentality.   One time for instance, I refused to participate in the semester Missions Convention because I witnessed a stupid display of my classmates in one of their "presentations" marching around with signs on stage like deranged Price is Right girls that labeled Byzantine-rite Catholics and others as "lost people groups," and what is funnier is that those idiots probably didn't even know what the hell a Byzantine Catholic even was!  While I am proud of obtaining my undergrad degree 30 years ago, if I could go back in time I would have chosen a different school and would have become a Catholic Christian of some sort sooner.  It was an education regardless, in more ways than one, and today I still keep in touch with many of those classmates - very few of them are in the actual mission field, and that is a good thing.  One, who was the de-facto head of our Intercultural Ministries team, ended up teaching salsa dancing with her husband where she lives - she was a nice kid, but I don't think she ever really comprehended what true intercultural communication was.  I think of all of our group then, I may possibly be the only one who has been engaged interculturally with others - I taught at a high school that was 100% minority students, and spent a large part of my adult life being in relationships with ethnic parishes that I was even actively involved in ministry in.  And, God willing, my second long-term teaching assignment is going to be at an Armenian Orthodox parish in DC, and for me that means something.  So again, where is this all going?  Let's see if we can real this big one in.

My identity as a Catholic has been shaped by the whole Church in many aspects - I am pretty much Eastern in much of my mindset now, but do retain some good Latin and Anglican practices too, such as being an adherent of Thomistic philosophy.  But, it was overall the Christian East that shaped the type of Catholic I am, and that is why given the current craziness going on in the Western part of the Church, I think I am opting for the Eastern-rite instead.  While my preference would be a Maronite parish, in Baltimore the sole Eastern-Rite Catholic Church is a Ukrainian parish, St. Michael's, and that is where I am calling home until it's time to move on.  I toyed with the idea of converting to Armenian Apostolic if I get this school position, but probably won't - if anything, if an Armenian Catholic church establishes in the area, I will attend that.  I have a partial Armenian birthright too, so I am at home with them as my people essentially.  My fundamental identity overall is still Catholic, although I am not a fan of either one of our two recent Popes, and I have less love for some of the bishops and even some clergy who openly defy Catholic teaching on fundamental things like human sexuality and even Biblical origins of the universe.  But, I have to remember I am not Catholic because of the Pope, whoever that might be.  The Pope is a man, not a divine being, so his authority over me only goes so far, and I respect it within given boundaries.  Essentially, where the Pope agrees with established doctrine and Tradition, I am in agreement - however where he varies, I actively oppose that.  For instance, I don't think our Cardinals and the Pope should be giving homage to pagan deities like Pachamama (which warrants instant excommunication, by the way) but then they cruelly ostracize faithful Latin Mass groups like the SSPX.  And, with 60% or more of American Catholics denying basic things like the Real Presence and other things, that is not the Catholicism I embrace.  Many visionaries and saints in the Church foretold a schism happening in latter times, and I think we are seeing the initial tremors of that now.  If the Church splits, I will align with the orthodox side of it.  Thankfully though, it seems that the Roman Church crisis is only affecting the Roman Rite, as the Eastern Catholics have tended to bind more strongly to their traditions and have remained generally orthodox in faith and free from the controversies surrounding many Roman dioceses in the US and Europe right now.  Another shining hope is the Third World, as there are more orthodox Roman Catholics in places like Latin America, Africa, and the Philippines.  That is encouraging, and that faithful remnant will be the true Catholic faith when that schism comes.  It will be a smaller Church, as the late Pope Benedict XVI noted, but it will be a more faithful Church.  And, with the way things are going - the Archdiocese of Baltimore is a microcosm of the greater issue, and in Baltimore proper the Catholic establishment is decaying - this could be a reality sooner than we think or could have guessed even.  But, the type of Catholic I will be is a historical Catholic, with heavy influence from the Christian East.  And, that is why my work with Armenians is important as well. 

Thank you for this long, rambling post and for enduring it with me, and I will see you next time when I have more inspirational thoughts.